BEFORE: This film was originally scheduled for last December, along with three other films with Billy Bob Thornton in them, but something had to be cut so I could work in a third Christmas film, which was "A Very Murray Christmas" - I think I made the right call. But it's been re-scheduled for today, which is probably the earliest I could have worked it back into the mix. Charlie Hunnam carries over from "Papillon".
Still up in Massachusetts, helping my parents with computer stuff when I can, helping them get take-out and stuff, though I also convinced them to go out to a real restaurant, live and in-person for the first time in 14 months. Well, jeez, my Dad is only going to turn 80 once, after all. And you never know when their health might take a turn for the worse, plus my mom's sort of losing it in the memory department, she's kind of not all there now and there's a little bit less of her every time I come up to visit. So there may be some difficult conversations in the future about how long they can continue to live in their house, with my Dad keeping an eye on her long list of medications and overall health. We're not the kind of family that likes to talk about this sort of thing, but at least while I was here I had a conversation with my Dad about options, and how I'm generally unable to get away more often and help out here, but of course if there's an emergency I'll make do and get up here as soon as I can.
THE PLOT: A drug-dependent young man faces his past and his demons after he checks into rehab.
AFTER: My whole weekend's been about drugs and meds - listening to my father talk about my mother's medications over and over, then getting the new printer working so he can print out a list of those meds to have handy. I know this stuff is all very important, but it's just not something I want to deal with. Once we start talking about my mother's health, my first impulse is to run back to the train station and head back to New York, where I don't have to deal with it. At the very least I'm counting the hours until my early train tomorrow morning.
But let me deal with the film first. Isn't this based on the book that James Frey got in trouble for, like it was supposedly a hard-hitting memoir, but he maybe exaggerated or fudged some of the details? I'll have to stop and look this up before I finish. I remember he got caught in a lie while on the Oprah show, or maybe the book was in Oprah's Book Club - either way, you shouldn't lie to Oprah.
Either way, this is a film about (possibly fictional version of James Frey) going to rehab after getting arrested, being a troubled and troublesome person while in rehab, and then coming out the other side, after which troubles of a sort no doubt continued. He starts going through the twelve steps, but I think he only gets to Step Five in this film, since he doesn't believe in a higher power, and for some reason that's essential to the process. But I heard you don't have to believe in God to go through the 12-step program, like your higher power can be a tree or a rock or your Cocker Spaniel, as long as you admit you're powerless against drugs and/or alcohol. But then again, I'm not an expert on addiction or recovery - though I have been contacted by people going through the steps, inquiring if they could make restitution for any wrongs committed against me. It's difficult to know what to do in that situation, like if a kid bullied me in grade school and then contacted me years later to make amends. I tend to let people off the hook because it's easier for me, plus anything done to me made me who I am, and I'm (mostly) OK with who I am, so I guess no harm, no foul. Still, I tend to then wonder if I've done the right thing for those people in the long-term.
What I find a little suspect here is that James wakes up on a plane headed to rehab in Minnesota, and how does THAT happen? Didn't he have to agree to go to rehab? We see flashes of a destructive night of partying, during which he fell off a balcony and broke his nose, but he couldn't seriously be on a plane THE NEXT DAY headed to rehab, right? That doesn't seem possible, it's much more likely that he got arrested, there were some legal claims made against him, the judge decided to put any warrants or trials on hold if he agreed to rehab, and thus he'd end up on that plane. But all that would take a few days, minimum, therefore he couldn't be hung over on the plane from that night of partying, it's not possible.
Then we get to the broken nose - the doctor, of course, has to break it to reset it, which must have been painful. It's very dramatic and cinematic, but is this really the best medical solution for a broken nose, or is this just a convention seen in movies? Similarly, James has to have extensive dental work done, but by the time they get around to his, he's already in the program and is not allowed to have any anesthetic. Well, what genius thought that THIS was a good idea? Why not get to the dental work and the re-breaking of the nose BEFORE he's taken the pledge, so he doesn't have to suffer through so much pain. Isn't the opening to the Hippocratic Oath "First, do no harm." Doesn't causing pain count as harm? And, medically speaking, is all pain medication the same as addictive drugs, couldn't they give him a non-addictive pain reliever, or, you know, knock him out for the procedure? Ether? Nitrous? Anything except, "Well, you're an addict, so we have to drill into your mouth, and you're going to feel every bit of it..." Again, very dramatic for a movie, but I doubt that any respectable doctor or dentist would be so sadistic on a technicality. Or, you know, just maybe work out a better schedule?
The rules of the rehab center specifically prevent fraternization between men and women - but this seems quite unenforceable, in addition to being sexist and hetero-phobic. What's to prevent a man and a woman from having a friendly conversation while in rehab, where is the staff supposed to draw the line to define what's allowed and what isn't? And if zero contact is allowed between men and women, why are they allowed to be in the same building, why not put them in two separate buildings to minimize contact? Also, what's to prevent two gay men from getting together, or two gay women, you can't have rules that permit one type of fraternization but not another.
So, of course James is going to get together with Lilly, a young woman who's not supposed to be in contact with him, but is somehow allowed to come into contact with him. How can you get in trouble for breaking rules that are so poorly enforced? By the same token, James is expected to participate in group sessions he doesn't believe in, and encouraged to surrender to a higher power that he has no faith in. Yeah, this is bound to go well.
But he learns some coping techniques from the other inmates - the plot description on Wiki says that one of them, Leonard, is a mafia boss, but I didn't get that information about him at all, nor did he give off that vibe, he just seemed like a colorful character that maybe had a little bit of money and a lot of experience, so maybe I missed something. There's also James' roommate, whose name is Miles Davis, only not that one - he plays the clarinet poorly instead of playing the trumpet well. Despite personal setbacks and a tragedy, James makes it through rehab and when he gets out, he goes straight to a bar, orders a pint of whiskey and then doesn't drink it, to prove his win over temptation. It's a cute little coda, only it seems more like an urban legend, nobody would really do this, pay for a pint of whiskey and then waste it like this. Also, no bartender on the planet would allow this, and the movie ALMOST gets this correct.
Now, as for those discrepancies, and admittedly these were found in the BOOK, not the movie - but The Smoking Gun web-site found out that some elements of the book's story were fabricated, and while I still can't determine where the truth ended and the lies started, it was on Oprah's show that the author was interrogated about everything from the number of root canals he had to whether his rehab girlfriend, Lilly, really existed. It was then that the book's publisher, Nan Talese, had to admit that she had not made any attempt to verify ANY of the details in the book, which meant that it probably should have been published as a work of fiction rather than as a memoir. The Smoking Gun had already reported on discrepancies in Frey's criminal record, as he detailed it in the book, anyway - and once you pull one thread, it's a good chance that the whole sweater is going to unravel.
These controversies made it difficult to turn the memoir/novel into a film, but apparently it wasn't impossible. Actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson rescued the project and wrote the screenplay with his wife, Sam Taylor-Johnson, who also directed it. It didn't do so well at the box office, just about $90,000. Well, at least it found a second life on cable, I guess. Like yesterday's prison movie, if you enjoy scenes with men taking showers, both alone and together, then maybe you can find something here, to me it's right down the middle, neither good nor bad.
Also starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson (last seen in "Tenet"), Billy Bob Thornton (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Results"), David Dastmalchian (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Juliette Lewis (last seen in "Whip It"), Odessa Young, Charles Parnell (last seen in "42"), Andy Buckley (last seen in "Bombshell"), Ryan Hurst (last seen in "We Were Soldiers"), Dash Mihok (last seen in "Connie and Carla"), Eugene Byrd (last seen in "Dead Man"), Tom Amandes, Drake Andrew, Deep Rai, Albert Malafronte (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Carson Meyer (last seen in "The Nice Guys"), Frederick Lawrence, Logan Devore,
RATING: 5 out of 10 cafeteria trays
No comments:
Post a Comment